


We Do Have Reputations

by SyllableFromSound



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Jealousy, Light Angst, Major Character Injury, Minor Original Character(s), Police, Secret Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-13
Updated: 2019-12-13
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:14:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21783535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SyllableFromSound/pseuds/SyllableFromSound
Summary: "She closed her eyes slowly when Hurley ran a thumb over her cheek, and she turned her head to the side when Hurley tried to get a better look to see if she was okay, and this was how Sloane loved her, by giving way to her like this. And this was why she loved to be loved by Sloane, because she relented for no one else, because she let herself be moved by no one else. This belonged to Hurley alone.Though that didn’t mean it had to always be behind closed doors."Sloane gets hurt by the militia. Hurley does what she can. (Or, Hurley just wants to hold her girlfriend's damn hand in public, is that too much to ask? T for adult language and description of injuries. For the tumblr prompt "I know it hurts, I'm sorry.")
Relationships: Hurley/Sloane (The Adventure Zone)
Comments: 15
Kudos: 36





	We Do Have Reputations

**Author's Note:**

> Please scroll to the end to find the podfic version of this story, recorded by quoththegayven!

Hurley rounded the corner into the alley and saw the blood black and bright as motor oil in the nighttime. She had been expecting and dreading it.

"Shit, Sloane." She didn't remember until a moment later about using real names out in public, and she couldn't bring herself to care even after she did. She ran forward to where Sloane sat slumped against the wall and slid to a stop on her bare knees. 

Underneath the black, beaked racing helmet, her breathing came out ragged. She brushed away Hurley's hand when she carefully tried to lift the bird mask away. "Alright, Curls, I'd say you're the healer of our team, yeah?" Her hand rested on her belly, over the spot where the thin wooden shaft stuck out of her. "Do I leave this in me or pull it out now?"

"Sloane, you need a fucking hospital," she hissed. "I'm taking you."

"Oh, and you're going to check me in there, Lieutenant? That'll look good."

"I'll just drop you off and go if that's what you want! I'll be anonymous."

"No. They could still figure out who I am there, even without the mask." She pushed herself up slowly against the brick wall with one hand. "Besides, I'm not even that bad."

"Sloane..."

"I'm not! Just..." Behind the helmet's dark visor, it was difficult to tell whether she was making eye contact. But she turned fully toward Hurley for the first time all night. "Just help me out a little now, alright? Then I'll take care of myself afterward, I promise."

She tried to give Sloane a glare that she couldn't sustain for long. In the dark, it would be hard to see her disapproval anyway. Hurley finally relented and let out her held breath, though it left her feeling no more relieved. Drops still fell from Sloane's stomach now and again. "If you're going to run, you should take the bolt out. You might bleed more, but it's better than risking more internal damage while you're moving around," she murmured. Then she paused and placed a hand over Sloane's, where it rested over her gut. "Would you...would you rather do it yourself or should I..."

"Could you?"

For a long time, Hurley took in the cold air and just kept taking it in. It made her shiver as she wrapped her hand firmly around the tail end of the crossbow bolt. She kissed the only exposed part of Sloane's skin that she could reach, where her neck met her collarbone, and then she pressed her forehead gently against her chest there, mingling their cooled sweat. Then she removed the serrated arrowhead the only way that one could when one was without magic-induced anesthesia, surgical tools, and time.

Sloane barely kept herself from screaming. As it was, the sound strangled halfway up her throat and the air came out as a gasp. "Sorry, sorry, shh..." At once, Hurley tore the fabric from the bottom of her gi--first-aid kit wasn't as easy to reach--and started to press it against the wound. She imbued it with what healing ki she could, but a few seconds of contact would never be enough. Harm was an instance; mending was a process. 

Sloane was almost doubled over, coiling her body around the wound like she were shielding a child in her lap. Briefly, she shook against Hurley but still stood. She shouldn't have had to. It might have been absurd, but she wanted Sloane collapsing into her, wanted to take on all her weight. "I know it hurts. I'm sorry. I'm..." She swallowed hard. "I'm so sorry..."

"No, it's fine," she croaked. "I asked you to do it."

"Well, you didn't ask for this! I'll kick their asses for you, alright? They're not getting away with this."

Sloane simply took the fabric from her hands and pressed it to her own stomach as she began to move away. "We'll talk later, okay? I'll get--shit." 

Hurley heard it, too, a second later. The click of crossbows being cocked and footsteps rushing down the street. Without another word, Sloane took off running and disappeared around the bend.

That left her to turn around and face her troop of fellow officers as they came into view before her--bows drawn, and by the gods, she was going to report every one of them later for aiming a weapon without a target in sight. "Hold your fire!" she blurted. 

Only when they all stopped and stared at her blankly did she realize that she should probably justify that, along with the panic that pitched her voice upward.

"Ah...these are apartments along this alley. All of them, I think. I'm not going to have stray bolts going into folks' homes while they sleep!"

It wasn't a good lie. She would've known that even if she hadn't seen the confused glances they gave each other. There was a reason she liked to leave the lying to Sloane when they were on the verge of being discovered. But anyway, her officers were meant to listen to her whether they believed her or not. "The Raven's still running. Took off down Hoopoe Street in the direction of Town Hall. You both, head west and see if you can cut her off!" And like that, she sent them off in different directions, none of them the way in which Sloane had gone. Later, they'd talk around the water cooler at the office about how the thief had slipped off again, how they'd practically had her in the bag before she'd just vanished like shadow passing into darkness. 

Hurley followed them, but she wasn't with them. She thought of Sloane running on rooftops, stark black up against the moon, hair waving behind her. For a moment, she thought, again, of saying, _Fuck every last one of you._ Or else saying nothing to them, ever again.She considered how easy it would be to slip away herself, just to fall back from the group until the darkness took her away from them entirely, to leave her badge on the militia's doorstep and become a second silhouette coursing alongside the Raven, in the moonlight for all to see. And then she stopped, because if she thought too hard about it, she'd think of all the reasons it wouldn't work, and she didn't want the fantasy to deflate just yet. 

She couldn't, however, make herself stop thinking of the possibility that Sloane was not running now, could not run now. 

It was difficult, when she got back to the office in the wee hours of the morning, to convince her superiors that she was simultaneously too hurt to perform the rest of her shift and not hurt enough to be immediately sent to an ER. The signs of a scuffle with the Raven helped, though--she hadn't even thought to point out her torn clothes until someone mentioned it. Maybe they saw the worry showing through her shaken, shaking self and mistook it for a rare bout of concern for her own safety. That probably helped, too.

While she filled out the most perfunctory of reports, she attempted to put some of her training to use by looking at the situation for what it was. She had once watched Sloane walk off the racetrack with shrapnel in one thigh and a burn on the other, giving the crowd an overdone bow on the way out. She was no stranger to this. At this point, neither of them were. True, at the races, medical help was usually nearby, because it had to be. Sometimes it was very close indeed. Nobody had seen it, but after the Raven had walked away under her own power, she had gotten to a quiet place out of the sun and leaned on the Ram, who got to work on the gashes. The Ram wasn’t there now.

The safehouse that Sloane had set up for herself sat on the second floor of an empty apartment building that had been slated for demolition for three years. It was after moonset and not nearly soon enough that Hurley made it to the paint-chipped door on foot, having stepped around the places where she knew the invisible Alarm spells had been set, and rapped out the special, encoded knock signaling that it was her.

There was silence from the other side. She began to wonder whether Sloane had gone elsewhere, or whether she had been able to go anywhere. Both her actual apartment and the garage they shared were much farther away from the spot where everything had happened last night, so it wouldn’t have made sense for her to run there, but then, almost half a night had gone by. Already, Hurley had wasted so much time trying to get the militia off her back without them suspecting how urgent it was. She might not have been quick enough. 

She was just preparing to knock again when she heard shuffling from deep inside. It must have gone on for a couple of minutes before the door finally creaked open. Through the crack slipped a hand clutching the shining, gold-painted horn of her familiar ram mask. 

She blinked at it. "Why--"

"Just put it on!" Sloane's voice hissed from inside. 

Hurley obliged and stepped through to see—thank the gods—Sloane, standing, still in the helmet that enclosed her whole head. She opened her mouth to speak, but she didn’t have the chance to get out a sound. Without a word, and without allowing for a chance to ask how she was feeling, Sloane turned. Hurley had come with the energy of Healing Hands tingling in her palms in case she needed it, but Sloane seemed to be walking better already, upright if a little slow and limping. She was walking away just fine.

Sloane was a good actress, Hurley reminded herself. She was pretending not to care. That didn't mean she might not have also been angry about being shot by people under Hurley's command. 

"You know, Raven, I think I recall you being the one who wanted to keep this on the down-low." The call came from the living room, slathered in mock-sympathy. "Just between us and all that. Wouldn't want word getting back to the other racers that you weren't in top shape."

"Yeah, well, you're shit out of luck, because it's no one you can gossip with here. It's just my partner."

That word again. It was the only one she had ever heard Sloane use to refer to her, at least in front of anyone else. "Racing partner" is what she meant, of course. Hurley wasn't sure if she intended for the plausible deniability about what sort of "partners" they were aside from that. But no other word like "girlfriend" or "lover" had been used by either of them, not out loud. The question had been, after maybe the third instance of supposedly "no-strings-attached" sex, _Hey, so is this just what we’re doing now?_ and the answer had been, _Looks like it._ It had seemed simple and natural. They hadn't been any more specific about what “this” was at the time.

"Oh, I know who it is."

Hurley pushed past the old woven rug that hung in the doorway to come face-to-face with someone who looked as though every part of them had been stretched out. They were human, tall and narrow as the gap between jail bars, with long arms full of measly muscles and straight hair down to their knees. There was smile on their face and a shine in their eye. "Well, hello, Ram! You clean up alright. I'm used to seeing you covered in dirt." They said this as Sloane sat down in front of them. They laid hands back on her bared belly, where the wound had begun to close up and her muscles looked tense.

Hurley took one look at Crane and then glanced back Sloane's way. "Raven, seriously?"

"What? They know what they're doing!"

"Why, thank you! I’m extremely talented," said the person who, though they hadn’t won a race in months, could easily clinch the award for Shadiest Cleric on the Racetrack, and Most Likely All of Goldcliff. (Honestly, maybe they were lying. They could have been some bizarre kind of warlock.)

"They're going to bleed you dry at best and might make it even worse if it suits them. You know that, right?"

"Excuse me? I think you'll find that I'm doing a fine job stopping her bleeding, no thanks to you. And it’d be bad for business if word got around I was hurting people who paid me."

"Hey, I didn't ask you to come and watch," Sloane said with a half-shrug, as though entirely unbothered one way or the other.

She was a good actress. But that, quite frankly, was a little much. Hurley chewed on the tip of her tongue until it just barely began to hurt. It was bad enough, she thought, that she wasn't the one doing the healing right now, that someone else was putting their hands on her. She could, just barely, watch strands of this asshole's foreign magic slither like worms into Sloane. But to imply that she'd ever choose not to be by Sloane's side was adding too much insult to injury.

On the other hand, it wasn't like this was anything new. Given how many racers engaged in worse illegal activity on the side, most rivals were loath to show their faces to one another, let alone share personal details that could be used against them. For her and Sloane, that had always meant keeping their closeness under wraps, in front of criminals and law-abiding citizens alike. Which was to say, everybody.

Finally, Crane stepped away and let Sloane run her hand over the spot that had just healed. "See, now, you're good as new! Be back to eating shit on that racetrack in no time. That'll be 700 gold, my dear."

"That's a funny way of saying 300 gold," Sloane responded at once, putting her jacket back on.

“Do you think I make house calls in the middle of the night for fun?”

“I think you’re out of your mind. I could have bought three healing potions for that much.”

“Ah, but you didn’t!”

Seeing where this was going and not especially keen on a five-minute-minimum bargaining session over how much Sloane's actual life was worth, Hurley stepped forward to drop a sack of coins into Crane's hand. "That's 650, alright? Now please leave."

"Ram, fuck's sake, don't give into them like that!"

"Aw, very sweet of you, sheep."

"Fuck you," Sloane said. A selfish part of Hurley hoped that was for her. 

"So it's true, then?" Crane's grin stayed smug, but it was no longer satisfied. There was something new in the way they held themself. The way their head tilted as though trying to see from a different angle, the little bounce in their knee as they stood there. Behind those thin, grinning lips, it was clear, they salivated for an answer. "What they say about the two of you, I mean."

"They say a lot of things about us. Now kindly fuck off out of here." Her tone was flippant, but the skin stretched taut over her knuckles as her fist kept tightening at her side. She had one arm outstretched toward the door, and that was held stiffly, too.

But she might have just said yes. There weren't many these days in the racing scene who didn't at least suspect, and these were people who would wear their "lucky" boxers for two months straight if they thought it would let them win a race or outrun a cop. If they had a suspicion, any inkling of what might give them even the barest advantage, then they were acting on it already. Sloane lost nothing by confirming what everyone already thought they knew anyway.

As for what the pair of them stood to gain? Admittedly, Hurley wasn't quite sure. Maybe freedom, or maybe just a way of knowing that they'd been free all along. Free to share their victory kiss out in the open, drenched in sweat and the sun and the clamor of the crowd and each other. They didn't always have to crash together rough and quick as they ducked down a shadowed alleyway after a race.

"Sure, sure." They sneered. "I was just wondering if I could tell everyone that I heard wedding bells."

Her fingers uncoiled only to snap to the handle of the dagger at her thigh. Her shoulders were forward, the ruff of feathers around her collar seeming to puff out like the neck of a frilled lizard. She walked at them quick enough to startle them back a step, the black beak of her mask inches from their eye. Hurley had seen her like this before, this posturing. There was a time when she might have fallen for it herself. That was before she knew to look for the quickening of Sloane's breath, the way her whole body stiffened as if bracing for a blow. She almost felt like ruining it. She felt like saying, _I see you bluffing._ She felt like saying, _You’re full of shit._ She felt like saying, _You don’t have to do this._ "Crane, if you fuck me over--"

"Alright, alright!" Their hands were up in front of them. "Fantasy Jesus Christ, you woke up on rather the wrong side of the bed, didn't you?"

"I got shot."

"And you're a very bad sport about it." They spun on their heel and raised their hand without looking back. "Happy trails, you two."

Sloane slumped as soon as their footsteps had faded completely. She was stable now, and the only blood left in the room had long since dried to shit-brown, but exhaustion pressed down on her like a hand on the place where her neck met her spine. Hurley saw it and had the thought, as though it had been whispered to her without warning, _One of these days, I'm going to make you honest._

As soon as she sat on the couch, Hurley joined her, trying to ignore the springs pressing up against her under the ratty upholstery. "Sloane?"

Sloane turned her way. This time, when she tried to lift the raven mask away, she wasn't prevented. For the first time since yesterday, she saw bright green eyes underlined by dark crescents, looking her softly all over. Sloane also didn’t flinch when she reached out toward her face—Hurley had always understood why she hadn’t liked hands coming near her, but she’d said that she wanted to break herself of the habit anyway, and it seemed that she had. She brushed aside the strands of hair that had been plastered to the side of her face by sweat since last night, rubbed lightly at the indents in her skin that had been left by the mask. She closed her eyes slowly when Hurley ran a thumb over her cheek, and she turned her head to the side when Hurley tried to get a better look to see if she was okay, and this was how Sloane loved her, by giving way to her like this. And this was why she loved to be loved by Sloane, because she relented for no one else, because she let herself be moved by no one else. This belonged to Hurley alone.

Though that didn’t mean it had to always be behind closed doors. Would it be such a bad thing if people knew the way those eyes fixed on her? Would it be so bad if, when they were out in the wind, people saw her brush Sloane’s hair aside to get a better look at them?

Of course it would be, for plenty of reasons.

"What are you lookin' at?" Sloane finally murmured with a small, tired smile. "I know I look like shit."

"I'm sure I do, too. We both haven't slept."

“Rough night, huh?

Hurley snorted. “I think I should be the one saying that to you.” In the growing light just before sunrise, she could see what she hadn't before, the smaller cuts across her chest and over her arms. Nothing big, but there, and red. "They missed all of this." 

Sloane raised her brows a little. "I didn't ask them to take a look."

"You shouldn't have to ask." Hurley stared her down on purpose as she said it, to make sure the words stuck out to her.

It was unclear whether they did. She glanced away and scratched at her hairline. After seeming to think for a moment, then, she said, "Well, they would've charged me more for that, I bet. Speaking of which, I guess this means I have to pay you back."

"You're an ass," Hurley said just before kissing her, slowly this time. Sloane placed her hands over Hurley's where they rested against her damaged chest, keeping them pressed there. Hurley had her eyes closed, since she didn't have to look to feel the way the warm healing magic flowed from her fingers and into Sloane's body. She could sense the cuts closing one by one. 

If she could help it, she’d always give Sloane a reason to be honest. She'd be the reason Sloane hummed to herself when she worked on the engine and laughed with her mouth wide open. Hurley would be the reason she felt safe enough to lean forward and rest her head on someone’s shoulder and doze at dawn in a run-down old apartment, the way she was now.

And it didn't have to be now, but Hurley saw forward to a time when the two of them clasped hands out in the desert noonday, out where people couldn’t ignore the flash of her black hair as the sun sparked off it. Where people couldn’t ignore how proud she was of this woman and being chosen by her. Not now, but one of these days, something would give. One of these days, they wouldn’t be able to contain themselves anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> Who, me? Writing Hurloane as a metaphor for gay isolation?
> 
> Like I said, this was originally written for an ask meme prompt on my blog @adventuresloane on tumblr! Feel free to check me out there. Title is from "Once More To See You" by Mitski, ofc. 
> 
> Please drop me a comment if you enjoyed! Thank you for reading!!!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [We Do Have Reputations [Podfic}](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24034735) by [quoththegayven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quoththegayven/pseuds/quoththegayven)




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